Memoir was the last unit and would have been, in a longer course, the largest. It is the form closest to the spoken life. In these last four Sundays we asked: what is the memoirist remembering, and what is she making? What is the double structure of every honest memoir — the past that happened, and the present that interprets? What does revision mean for a writer of one’s own life? And what is the writing life itself for?
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
Chapter I of the Narrative is six pages long and is one of the great openings in American literature. Douglass tells us he was born in Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland, and that he does not know the year. He has met no slave who did. White children know their birthdays. The deprivation of the date is the first deprivation of personhood. He tells us his mother was Harriet Bailey, separated from him in infancy and hired out twelve miles away. He tells us his father “was admitted to be a white man,” possibly his master. He tells us he saw, as a small child, his Aunt Hester whipped by the overseer Mr. Plummer. He says: “It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.”
This is the session in which we asked: why do people write memoirs? There are many reasons — vanity, restitution, grief, the wish to be understood — but the deepest reason is the one Douglass demonstrates in six pages: the wish to make a private experience public so that no one may say it did not happen. The memoir impulse is testimonial. It says: This was real. I was there. Let it be known.
Read the sentence about not knowing his age. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” The clause as horses know of theirs is the line. Douglass refuses euphemism; he names the dehumanization with the metaphor the system itself used.
Read the description of his mother. He saw her four or five times in his life, always at night, always briefly. “I never enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care.” The sentence is restrained almost to the point of suppression. The restraint is the wound.
Read the “blood-stained gate.” Douglass had to write for a white American audience in 1845 that mostly believed slaves were content. He could not afford rhetoric they would dismiss. He gives them a scene that no reader of any conscience can put down and forget.
The slave narrative as American literary form. The genre emerged from the antislavery press of the 1830s and 1840s. Its conventions: testimony of authenticity, a horrifying scene of violence early in the book, a literacy narrative, an escape narrative, and a public-platform conclusion. Douglass’s Narrative is the genre’s masterpiece.
Historical weather. The book appeared in 1845, sixteen years before the Civil War. The Fugitive Slave Act was five years away. Douglass’s publication of the book put him in legal danger, and he fled to Britain for two years.
Why does Douglass open with the question of his birthdate?
Because the slave system erased the most basic facts of personhood. To reclaim a self, one begins by naming the erasure. The missing birthdate is the first sentence of the book’s argument.
What is the function of Aunt Hester’s whipping in the structure of the chapter?
It is the inciting scene. It is what made him a witness. The memoir is the testimony of that witness. Without the scene, the chapter would be sociology; with it, the chapter is literature.
How does Douglass establish his authority to speak?
Through restraint, precision, and refusal to exaggerate. He undersells, where another writer would oversell. The plain prose is itself an argument — a person who could write that prose could not be the subhuman the system claimed he was.
What is the difference between memoir and autobiography here?
An autobiography proposes to give the whole life; a memoir takes one strand and tells its truth. Douglass’s Narrative is in fact a memoir — it is the story of his enslavement and his escape, not of his entire life — and that limitation is its power. The first memoir lesson: choose a strand.
Mary Antin · Booker T. Washington
This is the session in which I tried to explain what the critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick has named the situation and the story. The situation is what happened — the facts, the chronology, the events. The story is what it means — the wisdom the memoirist has reached, looking back, that the person living through it could not yet see. Every honest memoir is built on this double structure. Two voices in the same sentence: the one who lived it, and the one who is telling it now.
“I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am just as much out of breath as if I had actually walked across the continent of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to reach my present halting-place.” She is thirty-one. She tells us, in the same paragraph, that her childhood self “is little Mashke of long ago, the dweller in shtetlech, the daughter of Israel, the unlettered, the unfree, the unliked, the foreign” — and then she says: “She, and not I, is my real heroine.” That sentence is the double structure named in one line.
“I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.” The wit of the second sentence is the entire double structure in miniature. The man writing can afford the joke about not knowing where he was born. The child who didn’t know could not have made the joke. The book’s voice belongs to both at once.
Look at any sentence in a strong memoir. You will almost always be able to identify both voices — the past self living, the present self interpreting. A memoir written entirely in the past voice — the voice of the child without the adult’s wisdom — is a novel. A memoir written entirely in the present voice — the adult’s wisdom without the child’s living — is an essay. Memoir is the genre that holds both. The reader must hear the older self loving the younger self, and noticing the younger self’s errors, and not condescending.
What is the difference between the “situation” and the “story” in a memoir?
The situation is the facts: who, when, where, what happened. The story is the meaning the older self has discerned in those facts. A memoir without a story is a chronology. A memoir without a situation is an essay.
Is the older self always wiser than the younger?
No, and the great memoirs know this. Sometimes the older self is more disillusioned, more cautious, less brave. The double structure is not a hierarchy; it is a conversation between two versions of the same person.
Is memoir true?
It is true in the way a witness is true. Memoir does not promise the legal truth of a deposition; it promises the emotional truth of a remembered life. The memoirist may compress two scenes into one, give a composite character, change a name. What she may not do is invent the meaning.
What is the function of the famous opening sentence?
It announces the double structure. The first sentence of a memoir is the contract with the reader.
Sherwood Anderson, “Death in the Woods” (1933)
An old woman, a stranger in the narrator’s small Ohio town, walks to town to barter eggs at the grocer’s, exchange them for salt pork and corn meal, and walk home in the snow to feed her husband, her brutal son, and the animals. She has fed others all her life. On the way home she sits down to rest in the woods. The dogs circle her, run in widening circles, then come back. She freezes to death. The narrator, then a young boy, saw the body in the snow. Decades later — and this is the story’s great move — he is writing the story he has been trying to write since he was a child: the story of the old woman whose name no one ever learned.
This is the session in which I tried to teach that revision means, etymologically, to see again. It is not copyediting. It is not tweaking. It is the act of looking back at what you have written or what you have lived and seeing it differently — usually more clearly, sometimes more tenderly, always more truthfully. “Death in the Woods” is a story about revision in both senses: the narrator is revising his memory of a childhood scene, and Anderson, the writer, is revising the story itself, which he tried to write for twenty years before he found the version we read.
Listen to the narrator’s voice: “The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.” The story is about that understanding — about how the writer’s job is not to record what happened but to keep returning to it until he sees what it meant.
Read the moment in the woods. The dogs running in circles. “They were waiting for the cold to finish her and they knew. They knew.” The repetition is the narrator hearing himself believe what he is saying. He was not there when she died; he is making it up; he is also remembering it with the fidelity of someone who has thought about it for forty years. Both are true.
Read the ending. “I had to wait until I had become a man and could understand what an old animal woman is doing in the woods.” This is the story declaring itself a memoir of a writer’s slow comprehension of his own material.
Is this a story or a memoir?
It is both. Anderson called it fiction; the narrator is a fictionalized version of himself. But the story’s subject — a writer’s decades-long return to a remembered scene — is the memoirist’s subject par excellence. The line between memoir and fiction is often imaginary; what matters is that the writer is honoring an emotional truth.
What does it mean to “re-see” something?
To look at it again as if for the first time, with everything you have learned since the first looking. The narrator at sixty re-sees the dead woman in the snow with the eyes of a man who has watched his own mother grow old, who has loved animals, who has fed people. The scene is the same; he is not. That difference is the story.
How does this lesson apply to writing one’s own memoir?
You revise your own life by going back to it on the page. The scenes you remember from childhood will not yield their meaning on first writing. Write them anyway. Put them aside. Write them again three months later. The third draft will tell you what the scene was always about. Revision is the slow becoming of the truth.
Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (1854)
Thoreau tells us he went to the woods to live deliberately. He tells us he wanted to “front only the essential facts of life” and to see if he could not learn what they had to teach. He tells us that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. He tells us we should simplify, simplify. He tells us morning is the awakening hour and that to be awake is to be alive. He tells us he wishes to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
Because every course on writing is, finally, a course on living deliberately. The course is over. The room is empty. The notebooks are at home on your kitchen tables. And the question is the one Thoreau put to himself in 1845 at the pond, and that I put to you now: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
To make writing part of a life — not a career, not a brand, not a published book — is the gift this course wanted to give you. The reading goes on. The writing goes on. The notebook on the kitchen table, the half hour before the household wakes, the ten minutes after supper — these are the units of a writing life. Not a retreat, not a sabbatical, not a degree. Ten minutes, a notebook, and the willingness to be a little brave on the page.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…
Read the parallel construction. I wished, I did not wish, nor did I wish, I wanted. The sentence is built on a scaffolding of intention. Thoreau is not describing what happened to him; he is declaring what he meant. This is the rhetoric of the chosen life.
Was Thoreau actually a hermit?
No. He walked to Concord almost every day, dined with his mother often, hosted visitors at the cabin. The myth of the solitary mountain man is just that. Walden is not a manual for isolation. It is a manual for deliberation — for choosing what to allow into your life.
Is the writing life a luxury?
It can be made one. It does not have to be. Wallace Stevens wrote his poems on the walk to his job at the insurance company. William Carlos Williams wrote his on prescription pads between house calls. The writing life is what you choose to write in the half-hours you would otherwise lose. It costs almost nothing but attention.
What did Thoreau learn at Walden?
That a life can be made on much less than the culture insists upon, and that the gain — in time, in attention, in clarity — is enormous. He did not stay forever; he left after two years and two months because, he said, “I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”